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Postmortems and Retrospectives

Postmortems

  • Etsy’s Guide to Postmortems - by John Allspaw, Morgan Evans and Daniel Schauenberg. A lengthy document that provides a guide on the art of asking questions. On Failure and Resilience provides a briefer summary, describing an Etsy incident and how the team managed it.

  • Improving Postmortem Practices with Veteran Google SRE, Steve McGhee - by Blameless. Takeaway: Suggests turning your post-mortems into "textbook-lets," being cautious about finding good authors, and creating action items with structured discipline.

  • The Infinite Hows (or, the Dangers of The Five Whys) - by John Allspaw. Takeaway: A slight tweak to the “5 whys." Allspaw points out that “why” leads to blaming a person, while “how” leads to blaming the system.

  • Making SWOT Analysis Actionable - by Lisa Furgison. Takeaway: Make connections between each quadrant of your analysis, combining information from two quadrants to create actionable strategies:

    • Strengths–Opportunities. Use internal strengths to take advantage of opportunities
    • Strengths-Threats. Use your strengths to minimize threats
    • Weaknesses-Opportunities. Improve weaknesses by taking advantage of opportunities
    • Weaknesses-Threats. Work to eliminate weaknesses to avoid threats

  • Post-Mortem Templates - by Pavlos Ratis. A collection of postmortem templates from Google, Microsoft and others.

  • Root Cause Analysis: Practical Tools - by Ben Linders. Tools for you to use to conduct your own root cause analysis, including a process, a checklist to help you get started and a report with an example.

  • The Root Cause Fallacy - by Baron Schwartz. Takeaway: Asking why repeatedly will always get you to the CEO, eventually; stop looking for a single root cause — instead, identify system of conditions/dysfunctions that jointly caused the problem; change the culture and own failures as opportunities.

  • Social Issues in Postmortems - by John Allspaw. Takeaway: "Although apparently technically focused, postmortems are inherently social events. Especially for events with significant consequences, there are incentives to direct attention towards some issues and away from others. When large losses incur attention of senior management the tenor and content of the postmortem may shift away from freewheeling discourse to a more closed ended, narrowly technical discussion. Postmortems may become “stage plays” intended to assert organizational control, ratify management decisions, or localize and truncate the inquiry into circumstances and contributors."

  • Why Airbnb Encourages Employees to Predict Its Own Downfall - by Adam Vaccaro. Takeaway: Imagine the disruption that causes your company’s demise. Have pre-mortems: “Meet before a project and imagine they're a few months or a year in the future and that the project has failed.” Or the opposite: “the team imagines absolute success--and talks through the crucial hypothetical points in the process where the right decisions were made.”

Retrospectives

  • Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great [$] - by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. This book offers a wealth of tools, tips and tricks to make your retros effective.

  • Awesome Retrospectives - by Joseph Earl. A super-helpful, curated list of resources for facilitating and learning about retrospectives.

  • Energizing Retrospective – Energize Your Team Retrospective With This Easy Exercise - by Sam Laing. Suggests a combination of short positivity-generating and task-breakdown exercises to motivate teams to take action.

  • Failure: Why It Happens & How to Benefit from It (video) - by VM (Vicky) Brasseur. Takeaway: The most common causes for failure; suggestions for how to avoid failing; and how to use failure to your advantage. "[E]mbracing failure can be one of the best things you do for your project. Failure is a vital part of evolution. By learning to love failure we learn how to take the next step forward. Ignoring or punishing failure leads to stagnation and wasted potential."

  • Fun Retrospectives - by Paulo Caroli and Taina TC Caetano. Takeaway: A website with various exercises your team can play to extract value and fun from retros. Includes a link to download the related eBook, and another to their free and open-source fun retros tool.

  • Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives - by Ben Linders and Luis Gonçalves. Takeaway: "[A] pocket book [that] contains many exercises that you can use to do retrospectives, supported with the “what” and “why” of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they can bring you, and advice for introducing and improving retrospectives."

  • How Large Is YOUR Retrospective? - by Dana Pylayeva at Gilt/HBC Digital. Takeaway: Pylayeva describes how she and other facilitators organized a meaningful retrospective involving 60 people and five consulting companies. Lots of details, references to other resources and insights into what went well and what didn't.

  • How to Run HUGE Retrospectives Across Dozens of Teams in Multiple Time Zones - by Luke Hohmann. Takeaway: "[T]raditional approaches to retrospectives – assembling a group people in a room with one or more facilitators – are too costly, don’t scale, take far too long and fail to produce high-impact results. As a consequence, large organizations either skip retrospectives entirely or they relegate retrospectives to individual teams, which tragically limit their effectiveness in identifying and implementing enterprise changes that can profoundly improve performance. Over time, because individual teams are not obtaining material benefits from retrospectives, they stop doing them at all." Using online games can be a less expensive option.

  • How We Do Large Scale Retrospectives - by Henrik Kniberg. Takeaway: How decentralized retrospectives with tiered granularity helped Spotify hold large and meaningful retros. Breaking down large groups into teams organized around themes is the "scaling trick" here.

  • The Overall Retrospective for Team and Stakeholders - by Stefan Wolpers. Takeaway: How to do a two-hour retrospective with 16 people, based on the LeSS framework's overall retrospective concept—modified to include all team members, not just team representatives.

  • Retromat - by Corinna Baldauf and Timon Fiddike. Activities for retrospectives, plus an eBook link.

  • Retrospective Exercises - by Stefan Wolpers. Takeaway: How to use Retromat, which aggregates lots of exercises for retrospectives, to change up your retros to keep them interesting and fresh.

  • Retrospectives - by Norman L. Kerth. Takeaway: A website dedicated to retrospectives, "the practice of looking back to move forward." Includes the Retrospective Prime Directive: "Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."

  • Retrospectives for Large Teams with Many Sub-Teams - by Lisa Crispin. Takeaway: How Crispin organized a retro with 40+ team members, distributed into seven or so “pods” and across several locations.

  • Running Effective Retrospectives - by Don Werve. Takeaway: "[R]etrospectives plus science equals an effective tool for killing bad process before it metastasizes into truly epic stupidity."

  • Which Questions Do You Ask in Retrospectives? - by Ben Linders. With four key retro questions: "What did we do well, that if we don’t discuss we might forget? What did we learn? What should we do differently next time? What still puzzles us?"

  • The World Cafe – Agile Retrospective Technique - by Timothee Bourguignon. Takeaway: an approach to spread knowledge, tips and practices across teams.